


Full Measure, and Then Some

by calrissian18



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Based on the Events of 3x13, Coda, Episode Related, Immediate Aftermath, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-13
Updated: 2014-03-13
Packaged: 2018-01-15 14:24:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1308052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calrissian18/pseuds/calrissian18
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It would have been better if Walter had been able to let the chips fall when it came to Jesse.</p><p>He still couldn’t seem to stop stacking the deck for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Full Measure, and Then Some

**Author's Note:**

> This is set _directly_ after 'Full Measure' - the finale of season three - and can and should be considered AU after that. Mostly because, uh, I haven't seen past that yet but this is what I've imagined will happen for reasons I will probably never know.
> 
> It's odd that I'm here because... I don't even ship this. At all. I don't ship anything on the show. Because _Breaking Bad_ is not a shippy show. My inner fangirl massively disagreed with that today. I've suspected for some time now that she is _completely_ losing it though.
> 
> Hope you enjoy this, because I'm fairly certain my being here is a once in a lifetime event. ;)

Walter closed the door hard behind him, both hands pressed up against the inside of it and his forehead nearly close enough to glance against it.  He stood, panting, for a quiet moment.  He knew, for now, he’d protected himself.  Skyler and Walter, Jr., wouldn’t have to read about his death in the morning paper over tomorrow’s breakfast.  He’d kept them away from knowing too much about the  _cost_  of this, at least for another day.

Though, for all he knew, that was  _all_  he’d managed – one day, a few more hours, a couple of measly minutes.  Gus was a pragmatic man but that didn’t mean Walter wasn’t sure he couldn’t be pushed into doing something rash.

Killing Gale, it had been a harsh necessity.  Walter blotted out Gale’s face in his mind’s eye, painted some surrealistic picture of a man without an identity.  He regretted that it had been Jesse in the end, but he’d suspected it would come to that long before it did.  Gus was too smart a man to not act quickly.

He let out a shaky sigh and straightened up, letting his forehead drag against the door as he almost flattened himself against it, one hand still pressed to the wood and the other resting loosely on the knob.  He turned the lock, slid the deadbolt and stepped away.

The sound was a quiet one, almost missed over the complementary humming of the refrigerator and the A/C unit.  There was a gun in the drawer of his kitchen.  Another harsh necessity.

Walter quietly popped his jaw, deciding to risk the noise it would make getting it.  But the quiet tick-ticking sound got improbably louder and then there was a crash coming from his bathroom, where – if he recalled correctly – his window was open.  What kind of assassin made that much of a racket coming after their target?  Walter didn’t believe for a moment that they’d lost track of him, that they didn’t know exactly where he was.  As an intimidation tactic, it worked, that blatant disregard for your prey’s answering actions was chilling, but in that case, why wouldn’t they simply break down the door?

A clear picture formed in Walter’s mind and all he could think was, ‘No, no, no,’ as he stalked towards his bathroom, face darkening and jaw tightening.  He wouldn’t be stupid enough to—

But Jesse Pinkman had proved himself to be impossibly stupid.

The screen from the window was caught on his foot and he was making an incredible amount of noise trying to get it off, still half-standing on the toilet, his too long sleeves and baggy pants getting in the way.  Walter opened his mouth but Jesse gave a victorious exhale, muttered, “Ha ha, bitch!” and kicked it off.

Walter’s anger knew no limits.  He’d gone out of his way to save  _both_  their skins and Jesse had imperiled them all over again only seconds later.  “What in the hell were you thinking coming  _here_?” he hissed.  He’d only just swept his place for bugs thankfully but there were still amplification devices and Walter knew that he was at the very  _least_  being watched.  “Do you think there isn’t someone right outside watching me, hoping for  _this_?”  He rubbed at his forehead, pacing.  “Victor or Mike or maybe even Gus, did you think of that?  Do you  _ever_  think?”

He turned back to Jesse, looking at  _him_  for the first time rather than his increasingly idiotic actions and the ripple effect they often had.  He was haunted, hunted, eyes red, shirt and neck splattered with blood and blowback.  He’d done it up close, maybe even looked him in the eye while he pulled the trigger, and he’d lost a part of himself in doing it.  The same part that Walter had lost when he’d choked the life out of Domingo.

“Jesse,” he said quietly.

Jesse flinched.  It had been Walter’s voice that had told him to do it.  It would probably always be that much harder for him to hear. 

Walter breathed in deeply, asked the practical question first. “Do you think anyone saw you?”

Jesse swallowed, brushed his lower lip with the side of his sleeve-covered thumb and shook his head.

“Good, that’s good,” Walter praised, holding up his hands.  This kid needed positive reinforcement and Walter needed to start looking for more opportunities to give it to him rather than constantly smacking him down for every boneheaded move he made, and they were legion.  Looking at him, Walter knew he couldn’t tell him to leave.  He was stuck with this situation at least until morning.  “For now, you should—you should stay here.”  The words had no effect on Jesse.  He was blank, lost to something only he was experiencing.  “Jesse, what do you need?”

Jesse looked up at him, that horrible deadness still in his eyes.

Walter took a step back, nodding his head to himself, trying to plan this out on his own – because even with a partner, he was still always alone in these things.  Gus hadn’t been wrong, working with a kid, an addict, it was a mistake and it would have been better if Walter had been able to let the chips fall when it came to Jesse.  He still couldn’t seem to stop stacking the deck for him.  He gave Jesse an assessing look.  “The couch has got—” Jesse blinked wet, wide eyes at him, not even trying to hide how shattered he was, and Walter couldn’t  _not_  give him every advantage.  He sighed, redirected the sentence. “The bed’s comfortable enough,” he said, gesturing towards his bedroom with one hand.

He pulled out one of Walter, Jr.’s, shirts from his room when he stayed and a pair of his own sweatpants and showed them to Jesse – who was still standing in the bathroom, back curled in an uncomfortable-looking hunch as he slumped over himself – before setting them on the end of the bed.  Walter didn’t do anything else except pull the window closed, squeeze the ball of Jesse’s shoulder as he passed, walk into the living room and lay back on his couch, not bothering with the pull-out bed.

He stared up at the darkness of his ceiling, headlights throwing jagged shadows on it before glancing off the still slats of the fan.  He hoped that if he was going to die tonight, he wouldn’t have to watch it happen.  Like he suspected Gale’d had to.

Hoarse screaming woke him and Walter curled his hand around the cushion next to his thigh and used it to lever himself off the couch.  He wasn’t sure he’d ever moved so quickly, going from dead sleep to wide awake.

He ran to the door of his bedroom, hands thrown up on the frame, poised for anything.  Jesse was screaming like he was being tortured, howling out low, scratchy cries of pain while he writhed in the sheets.  There was no one else in the room.

“Jesse,” Walter said firmly from the doorway but he could barely hear himself over Jesse’s groans.  Walter stepped closer, grabbed Jesse’s shoulder when the moment seemed opportune, meaning neither one of them was likely to get injured in the process.  The panic in Jesse increased tenfold, the thrashing going wilder, more angry.  “Jesse, that’s enough,” Walter said harshly after he’d taken an abrupt elbow to the jaw.  He used his free hand to check it still moved as it was meant to and then brought it down to Jesse’s other shoulder, half-lifting him.  “Jesse, you’re fine.”

Jesse seemed to take the reassurance at face value and slumped into the hollow of his chest, face wet with either sweat or tears, possibly both.  He was shaking hard.  Walter pursed his lips, uncomfortable offering this level of reassurance but too aware of Jesse’s need for it to refuse.  He awkwardly patted Jesse’s back while fingers wrenched into his shirt, holding on for dear life.

The air around them was too quiet, too stale, so Walter started talking, inanely explaining where the phrase ‘holding on for dear life’ had originated and who was credited with making it famous.

He didn’t remember falling asleep.

He did, however, remember waking up.  His eyes weren’t the only ones open either.  Jesse’s own bloodshot gaze was staring up at him, the skin underneath patchy and loose.

It wasn’t even dawn, though a lighter night than when Jesse had first broken in through his window, and Walter’s arm was half-asleep.  Jesse’s shoulder and a good deal of his weight was on top of Walter’s bicep.  He’d apparently fallen asleep with Jesse curled in towards his chest, though he was no longer touching it.  They’d managed to keep some sort of distance between them, though not nearly enough.

Jesse raised his lip in a sneer but didn’t try to move away, didn’t do anything other than roll over and drop his full weight back down onto Walter’s arm again.  Maybe a little vindictively.  Walter looked back at the clock on his bedside table, rubbing at his eyes and moving his jaw back and forth, gauging. It was still sore but nothing was seriously wrong with it.  The numbers were blurred without his glasses but it looked like it was only just barely four in the morning.

He thought about yanking his arm out from under Jesse, decided to bear the pins and needles and laid back down.  He was asleep minutes later.

He wasn’t sure how he knew Jesse was awake when he came to.  His breathing was even and his back was moving under Walter, Jr.’s, thin t-shirt in consistent patterns but the air around him  _felt_  tense.  His shoulder was still dug into Walter’s arm and Walter brought up the rest of it above the bend of his elbow, flexing it so his hand ended up right in front of Jesse’s face.

Jesse subtly flinched at the sudden movement and Walter heard what sounded like a pained exhale.  Eventually he reached up with careful fingers towards Walter’s hand, brushing the tips over Walter’s palm and making the skin tingle in response.  He threaded their fingers together almost curiously and Walter opened his mouth because that really was a bridge too far.  He may have pushed Jesse into it but Jesse had done the same to him and Walter had never asked or even expected him to be around to pick up the pieces.

Before he could tell Jesse off, Jesse lifted up and blood started circulating through Walter’s arm and then Jesse was pulling their hands down, guiding them past the waistband of his pants— _Walter’s_  pants—where Jesse was half-hard.

He shifted his grip so that his hand was on the outside of Walter’s, forcibly teaching Walter the shape of him.  Walter instinctively tried to tug away but Jesse whined and shifted the lower half of his body back into the wall of Walter’s, ass pressed tight to Walter’s pelvis.

Jesse buried his face in the tail end of his pillow and moaned, pumping Walter’s hand on him and grinding his ass against Walter’s slowly plumping cock.

He could feel himself growing hard, his cock getting hot and heavy between his thighs, willing to take part in this after going so long without any sort of intimacy, but this wasn’t what Jesse needed right now.  Truthfully, this wasn’t what either of them needed.  “Jesse,” he started, serious and slightly stern, and it was the voice he used when dealing with a particularly stubborn student.  Which Jesse had been.  And didn’t that just add a whole new unpleasant layer to this?

Jesse huffed out a desperate breath, putting in all the effort of getting them both off as Walter hadn’t done any more than let Jesse lead his fingers to grip him.  “Don’t,” he forced out harshly, tilting his hips more obscenely and more intently back into Walter’s groin.

Walter let Jesse’s sweaty palm hold on to him as he got him off but he took more control of the rhythm and soon Jesse was more holding on to his wrist than guiding his hand.  Walter pumped him in even strokes, took care to focus on the head and ridge of his cock, treated this like everything else he had ever done – with a perverse desire to be the best.

Jesse writhed in the cage of his arms, free hand digging hard into Walter’s thigh, fingers undoubtedly leaving behind bruises.  The more effort Walter put into letting Jesse fuck his hand, the more effectively he ground back against Walter’s cock in return, lining it up with the crack of his ass and clenching every so often.

Jesse tugged insistently at his wrist and Walter got the message to let go of his cock, though he didn’t understand it.  Jesse snatched up his hand again as soon as it was unmoored and brought it up to his mouth.  He dragged the flat of his tongue over the lines on Walter’s palm, sucked whole fingers into his mouth, suctioning hard around them, and Walter’s dick gave a twitch between Jesse’s ass cheeks.  Jesse mimed blowing them, bobbing up and down, flicking his tongue over the tips, and then finally let go.

He grabbed hold of Walter’s hand with his own again and shoved them both back down his pants.  Walter gripped his dick without provocation and Jesse let go, let him take full control, pulling his own hand back out and twisting his fingers up in the sheets.  He punched the mattress four times in quick succession with his fist and hid his face in his pillow, focusing all his efforts on grinding back into Walter.

Jesse bit his lip and Walter pulled down the band of his own pajama bottoms, coming on the small of Jesse’s back where his shirt had ridden up while Jesse came hard in his hand.  And it was all a bit more of an anticlimax than a climax, what with how short they’d lasted and how amateur it had been.

Walter could stand to have the air conditioning lowered by about thirty degrees and his heart was trying to whap-whap-whap its way out of his chest.  His muscles were stringy, shaken, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had an orgasm so powerful.  Or rather, he could, and it had been in the back of a car with Skyler and there was no way this should have made him feel half as alive, let alone just as much.  There was a buzzing in his head and he could just barely hear Jesse’s loud panting over it.  Walter rolled onto his back, catching his breath, glad all over again that his head was shaved as he didn’t have to feel the sweat down near the roots of his hair.

He had no idea what he was meant to say to Jesse now, what that was other than one gigantic anomaly in their relationship.  They’d both needed something, he supposed, and they’d both taken it – regardless of how potentially foolish it was.

“Thank you,” Jesse said, still out of breath and with that kind of condescension and combativeness that colored almost all of Jesse’s words behind it, “Mr. White.”

And, despite the tone, it seemed that Jesse had the same view of it.  They’d taken what they needed from one another – a warm body. Even if the reasons behind why they’d wanted it were massively different.


End file.
